CPI
On X
2010
Telomeres, Scientist Shortages, Seiberg Witten, Inflation (CPI), E8 TOE, Immigration, Neoclassical tastes all now have fictional narratives.
2013
Naughty Math Games?? The USA Today headline calls our gauge theoretic CPI an evil trick to be used for good. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/02/12/evil-wall-street-tricks-can-be-used-for-good/1914479/
2018
You knew damn well I was gonna have a take on this when you followed me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/11/the-ideas-industry-meets-the-intellectual-dark-web/
"all these thinkers can do is appease their followers. They are thought leaders who cannot demonstrate any leadership." -@dandrezner
Nice to meet you Dan. But that "take" comes from where exactly? Research? Personal interaction? You left me confused because it didn't make sense.
Nice to meet you too, Eric. That "take" came from the @bariweiss essay that started this entire hullabaloo.
Splendid. But that "Take" isn't what the IDW is about. I mean do you take issue w/ my work on labor markets? Mortgage backed securities? CPI and GDP? Bret's take on drug testing on specially bred mice? Heather on risk in Education? Ben's conservative objection to Breitbart/Trump?
Are you objecting to Sam Harris' desire to put transcendence into Athiesm via meditation or even psychedlics? Jordan's emphasis on needing to offer unapologetically family/work-oriented male models to outcompete the lure of hate?
It just seems you found a take without a basis.
May I ask you to look again or too explain why all the interesting things we talk about are of no interest? You might want to look at my essays on Russell Conjugation, Excellence, The crisis in Physics, Four Quadrant model, Kayfabe, Anthropic Capitalism, Coasian immigration, etc.
Sure, I'll take a look.
How did it go? Honestly I would have thought this research would happen before forming such a strong conclusion.
[please continue to hold.....]
2019
2020
2021
Thanks for the invitation. I can try to explain my concern.
There really *is* a problem w MAGA, Trump, Qanon & conspiracy theories running rampant. And it will result in death & destruction if it spins out of control.
However it is being fueled by those who claim to fight it.
The entire war over fact checking is a war of 2 low resolution teams.
One team wants absolute freedom to spread wild eyed theories that just about everything is a psyop or a false flag.
The other team wants to impose institutional consensus reality on everyone via media & tech.
Unfortunately, I canât live under either. So each of the warring parties thinks Iâm against them & for the other team. In their mentalities if you arenât on their simplistic team you are, de facto, working for the other side. Thereâs no basic concept of *responsible* heterodoxy.
No the Freemasons do not run everything on behalf of pedophile reptilians who faked Sandy Hook with crisis actors.
Yes there are/were conspiracies behind Epstein, H1B, @MSNBC, PPE, climate science, the âGreat Moderationâ, Great Reset...everywhere institutions want a âconsensusâ.
Having spent a good portion of my 20s at Harvard, I know *exactly* how this game works. Our betters sit down and try to figure out how to control others behind closed doors. They see themselves as the intrinsically enlightened people who need to do the thinking for all of us.
When they wanted to cut our Social Security payments & raise our taxes they opted to try to change the CPI rather than pass legislation. When they wanted to pay less for scientists they knew to keep *silent* about NSF Labor Shortage claims even though such shortages donât exist.
These are the folks who tell you âmasks donât workâ rather than âsave masks for doctors as we forgot to restock them and moved all manufacturing to China like moronsâ. They will then spin on a dime to tell you âOnly bad dumb people donât wear masksâ. This is the worst of Harvard.
So I donât want Alex Jones and Qanon nor do I want @TwitterSafety, @msnbc and @Harvard. I see them as very different forms of the same thing: people who want to take away our ability to see clearly.
And, I assure you, @Harvard tries to paint anyone it canât control as dangerous.
So, my belief is that anyone who rejects/questions Davos, Consensus Reality, Institutional Narrative, Public Health Campaigns, High Immigration, Peer Review, Primary Election Coverage, Trust & Safety...will be treated as Alex Jones sooner or Later.
This is Managed Reality â˘.
I cannot live in Managed Reality ⢠because I think it defeats the purpose of being a human being. It negates being an American. It abdicates responsibility for our children.
I have defeated Harvard about half the times we have fought. How? Because they just arenât that good.
Managed Reality ⢠has a weak spot. Itâs not run by our A-team anymore. Fauci isnât Francis Crick. Biden isnât Elon. Janet Yellen isnât Satoshi.
In general, the A-Team is going independent because tech/media/Ed are enforcing way too much conformity through personal destruction.
So why am I worried?
Well, Iâve been trying to save the institutions. Itâs probably doomed, but almost no one is trying to do what I do: rescue the institutions from their death spiral by reinserting their critics in positions of prominence (eg Chomsky at MIT).
Hence my fear.
If I were a tech guy Iâd retreat into wealth. If I were a professor Iâd shut up and collect my salary with job security. If I was a politician or journalist Iâd follow the other sheep.
But Iâm a science guy, an American and a dad. And I want my kids to have a particular future.
Thanks.
CPI is broken. Why?
Think of CPI as a gauge like a thermometer. You canât have politically motivated folks making your thermometers or they can change the design to cover up climate change. Likewise you canât have economists changing the gauge to disguise the effect of printing.
A crypto native CPI governed on the blockchain to create a decentralized stablecoin people can rely on to keep their standard of living the same across time. A true alternative to fiat rather than a speculative investment asset like most other coins.
The economists canât yet compute a dynamic Cost-Of-Living-Adjustment or COLA or âChained Changing Preference Ordinal Welfare Konus Indexâ to be perfectly pedantic. Not because it doesnât exist. But because they donât have the math and donât want to lose their finger on the scale.
We must take CPI away from those who wish to back out a political agenda of printing money, raising our taxes by indexed tax brackets and slashing our indexed social security & Medicare.
Economics canât construct dynamic economic gauges like CPI/GDP until it learns gauge thy.
But more importantly, we have a culture that economics literally trumpets (and I swear I am not making this up) âEconomic Imperialismâ. It is âwe know math and you donâtâ-culture.
No. They donât know their own math. I will debate any high ranking economist on this point.
Itâs time to reveal that economics, far from embracing math or having physics envy, is deliberately avoiding solutions to old problems so that it can make up new gauges for CPI/GDP at will while telling the rest of the soft sciences âWe know your field better because we do math.â
No. Economics is an avoiding gauge theory, connections, Lie Groups, etc so it can retain its political relevance as an expert consultancy. Iâm with the crypto folks on this. Our economy must be protected from Seigniorage (printing money) and CPI tampering (e.g. Boskin Commission).
CPI should notâŚMUST NOTâŚbe adjustable to disguise inflation. It needs to be protected from the FED diluting the power of money and the BLS being free to disguise the effects by changing the method of construction.
End the forced wealth transfers of central bankers covering up their own failures with âReliefâ, âEasingâ, âStimulousâ, âRescuesâ, âToxic Asset Purchasesâ, and other bailouts of our incompetent financial overlords.
We must protect CPI from economists disguising wealth dilution.
P.S. before you remind me how arrogant this sounds, keep in mind, that I am willing to debate this publicly with any leading economist eager to defend the central bankers and triumphalist theorists openly bragging about their math. Read this, and be sick:
https://nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w7300/w7300.pdf
Moral: Gauge Theory fixes this intellectual corruption problem of economic imperialism, and #btc, blockchains and Crytpo can help.
Surprise.
[Word to the wise: watch very very carefully how your CPI is constructed. You have the right to know EXACTLY how it is constructed.]
NEW: Powell says it's time to retire the word "transitory" regarding inflation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2021-11-29/powell-and-yellen-in-the-senate-kwkw102n
Itâs hard to imagine how confused Economics is. Imagine you work for the @BLS_gov and you have to admit that your agency claims to compute our Inflation within a Cost-Of-Living framework, but doesnât maintain the central ingredient needed to compute or even impute Cost-Of-Living.
There are no preference maps, chained CPI employs a superlative Tornqvist formula to account for substitution. The documents introducing the chained CPI do a better job outlining the methodological and theoretical structures than I could.(https://bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/chained-cpi-introduction.pdf)
Follow the thread back from here. This is where the conversation ends. #EconTwitter may tell you terrible things about me.
Maybe. Or maybe they donât have a theory that works and they refuse to admit it while transferring billions through CPI releases.
Wait. Slow down.
Did you just say that BLS is claiming to work within a Cost of Living framework which *requires* preference maps *definitionally*, butâŚwords fail meâŚhas no preference maps? At all??
I must not be understanding. Chaining Tornqvist indexes isnât an answer here.
You cannot keep mumbling Economic word salad forever âModified LaspeyresâŚcore inflationâŚLowe generalization of the LaspeyresâŚChained Tornqvist with revisionsâŚchain driftâŚsuperlative index approximates flexible functional formâŚâ
Tastes change. Cost-Of-Living inflation is about tastes. If tastes evolve in time, the economistsâ COL framework disintegrates. That is: there is NO theory. #EconTwitter can tell you I donât get it.
It is THEY who donât get it. They canât escape it. Itâs in their own literature.
What you are seeing reported as Inflation is not coming from a well grounded theory. It is coming from human beings making policy level judgements as if they were merely making technical adjustments to a technical time series devoid of values about who should benefit or suffer.
Moral: you have a right to know whatâs in your food and how your pharmaceuticals were tested. You have a right to ask your surgeon what she plans to do during an operation.
You have a right to demand what economists are actually measuring as Cost-Of-Living W/O abuse for asking.
And, no, the answers to these questions are NOT in the BLS handbook on CPI methodology. Iâve looked.
The funniest part of our inflation measure is the â.8â here.
I so wish they were a little bolder and went with â6.8139942%, plus or minus 3*10**(-7) according to a Lowe index modified by hedonic adjustment for sub-aggregatesâ or some such.
More of us could share such a moment.
5 / The 6.8% inflation rate in the US is the highest inflation we've seen since 1982 and is understating true price increases as it assumes "shelter" (largest component of CPI @ 33%) only increased 3.8% in the last year.
Breakdown of reported CPI:
The meaning of the .8 is significant, but only because of the wealth that will be transferred by it. It is not really meaningful as part of a measure of the cost of living for the representative consumer.
Itâs effectively made up to make the â6.xâ look solid. Which it isnât.
Do you actually have a point here? Your quibble is with the â.8â because it âmakes the 6.x look goodâ??? How do you figure. I honestly think you tweet sometimes purely for the sake of it
Actually there are many points.
Inflation isnât a number itâs a field.
Inflation is path dependent.
Donât advertise precision that doesnât exist.
CPI is not yet in the COL framework as claimed by BLS.
Path dependence should be embraced.
Etc.
My followers have heard them.
Eric, I am one such enlightened follower..
In what regard/magnitude is stochastic path dependency to change such CPI value if prior estimates are proportionately miscalculated? At this point in time, how best would you gauge the relative rate?
This seems to be more along the line of your ânuclear vs nucularâ reference by which we quibble about semantics, with absurdly low impact on the end problem. The lack of precision for x path dependent function would similarly yield y persons debating lack of precision..
I donât want to go into it all here. But here is what I want.
A) BLS stops lying about COL framework. Stops hand waving about economic vs mechanical indexes.
B) Stop readying c-cpi-u to take over from cpi-u. We can see you coming.
C) Move towards personalized CPI using inputs.
D) Embrace curvature if moving to chaining.
E) Publish methodology of basket or representative consumer(s). BLS isnât an oracle.
F) Consider moving to a Cobb-Douglas/CES aware changing preference mechanical index if wedded to COL.
G) Admit to conflicts of interest (Boskin).
H) Move to field theoretic & group-valued indices (e.g. GL(2, R) indices for trade).
I) Stop trying to hide Holonomy. Itâs there. Accept that it is supposed to be there rather than hiding it with Walsh multi-period circularity test.
Etc.
But please stop making vacuous claims.
Iâm prepared to have high level conversations about this. But our current system is an abomination. No one knows what is in or out. Itâs a black box that means little. The theory is bad. The explanations are fake. And the system is opaque. Even a Laspeyres without lies is better.
2022
2023
2024
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